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Steinberg; "The future will be dongle free"


jerrydf

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Interesting twitter thread from Steinberg this morning (unless they've been hacked):

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Hello all, For many of you this is the announcement you have been waiting for. While we put our heart and soul into developing ground-breaking products in your best interests, we haven’t accomplished our promise to provide you with the user experience you deserve in every part of Steinberg’s technologies in recent time.

We have been listening to your feedback for years, but significant changes need time, and we had to carefully lay out our vision for the future.

But now the time has come to put our approach to license management at the center of our attention.

We have decided to adopt a new license management technology that everyone will benefit from to prepare for coming requirements.

An authorization system shouldn’t get in your way, but support you in the onboarding process.
Anti-piracy protection technology shouldn’t restrict you as the customer, but secure your investment.

A license management shouldn’t stop you from using your products, but enable you to be creative, whenever and wherever you are.

At this point in time, all we can tell you is that everyone at Steinberg is strongly committed to providing you as soon as possible with a solution that offers more flexibility, more reliability and, of course, a seamless migration.

It’s too early to announce details on the schedule or the new environment, but one thing is for sure: The future will be dongle-free.

The Steinberg Team

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They're gonna change from dongle to cloud based and be as unreliable as before. They only felt compelled to change because they got a bunch of negative press because of the fail their servers experienced when people tried to upgrade to version 11... And 10, 9, 8...

This is done and dusted. Steinberg doesn't listen to their users.

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14 minutes ago, jerrydf said:

A license management shouldn’t stop you from using your products, but enable you to be creative, whenever and wherever you are.

It’s too early to announce details on the schedule or the new environment, but one thing is for sure: The future will be dongle-free.

The Steinberg Team

I was just going through this today. Going on a trip in the caravan for a few weeks/months, wanted to take a DAW with me. I'm only taking the small 14 inch laptop.  Can't take Cakewalk because it doesn't scale well on the screen, too much clutter, can't take Cubase because I don't want to stick a dongle in the laptop, just know it will get broken, stolen or lost or something. Can't take Studio One because I have version 3 which absolutely cannot edit midi in loop mode, stutters and farts. So it looks like Mixcraft will get the job although I don't like how it sets up my Kontakt instruments, which leaves Reaper and I don't like that name. Oddly, I also have Cubase Elements but I wouldn't want to go through the E licencing activation and it has restrictions.

It's enough to drive me to a Mac and get Logic for the job.

I doubt they will make any changes before my trip but you never know.

 

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3 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Maybe governments decided to change the date because of the pandemic?

Since EVERYTHING has been exactly the opposite of reality, my guess is that April 1st will be the only normal day now...

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29 minutes ago, Paul Young said:

I'm wondering if Yamaha considers the eLicenser a sunken cost and they will be phased out.  VSL is the other company I know of that requires that dongle.  VSL also has the worst replacement policy out there.

Could be because no other DAW uses these dongles anymore. We're also seen people using laptops and mobile devices more are people are not buying many Pro Steinberg licenses because...Well, your laptop might only have two or three ports and having to sacrifice one of them for a piece of software is a nono. There's also the problem of reliability. These USB dongles are not cheap and they tend to be rather fragile. If it breaks, there's also the issue of how you get your licenses out of them, since they use encrypted proprietary file systems. Even iLok shaped up quickly and introduced their cloud solution to mitigate that issue.

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3 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Could be because no other DAW uses these dongles anymore. We're also seen people using laptops and mobile devices more are people are not buying many Pro Steinberg licenses because...Well, your laptop might only have two or three ports and having to sacrifice one of them for a piece of software is a nono. There's also the problem of reliability. These USB dongles are not cheap and they tend to be rather fragile. If it breaks, there's also the issue of how you get your licenses out of them, since they use encrypted proprietary file systems. Even iLok shaped up quickly and introduced their cloud solution to mitigate that issue.

Probably because a lot of Mac systems no longer have the traditional USB ports.

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